The Insanity of the Unmade Halo Movie

Some years back you may recall that a movie version of Halo was in the works at Universal with Neill Blomkamp (District 9) directing, and Peter Jackson producing. Alex Garland (Dredd, 28 Days Later) also wrote the script, but the movie fell apart because it was just going to be too expensive to make.

Then a webisode edition popped up which gained a big following, and now rumor has it Xbox Live is going to do a Halo series with Steven Spielberg producing. Spielberg is a big gamer, and was playing video games as far back as Jaws, where he had several full- blown arcade games on the Universal lot when he was doing the sound mix.

A rumor got out that Blomkamp could come back to finish the job and direct the pilot of the new Halo series, which would be an interesting irony to all this. As to why it finally fell apart, Blomkamp told Giant Freakin Robot, “My instinct was that if I crawled into that hornets nest it would not be good, and it was a clusterf*ck from day one.” There were too many cooks in the kitchen on the Halo film, and with trying to keep Jackson and Microsoft happy, as Blomkamp recalled, “The two sides weren’t seeing eye-to-eye.”

We also take Blomkamp’s word for it that his vision for Halo would have been “insanely cool.”

Funny enough, the World of Warcraft movie, which also would have been prohibitively expensive back in the day, is gearing up for a 2016 release, so perhaps there will one day be a full blown, big screen Halo movie. Then again, there’s better storytelling on cable and the net these days anyways, so perhaps Halo is right where it belongs.